


Mallowsweet

by irisdescence



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Magic, Don't copy to another site, Family Dynamics, Fix-It, Gen, Horcruxes, Morally Ambiguous Character, Pre-Relationship, Reincarnation, Runes, Self-Insert, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:08:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26049307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdescence/pseuds/irisdescence
Summary: Harper Weasley does not belong to this world, and she knows it.(But that doesn’t mean she’ll let a madman tear apart her family.)
Relationships: Harry Potter & Original Character(s)
Comments: 33
Kudos: 473
Collections: Random Amazing Fics, Stories I LOVED





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> mallowsweet in canon is burned by centaurs to read the stars. mallow in flower language means ‘consumed by love’.

I.

She wakes, kicking and screaming, with the acrid burn of steel and fire and pavement still at the back of her throat.

She doesn’t know anything at first. This world is too bright, too harsh, but the hands that cradle her now are soft. She can’t make out anything except white light and beige shadows and a haze of voices that settle over her like a blanket.

She is tired and afraid.

II.

Her hearing sharpens. Her vision improves. Colours _(red-orange-yellow-brown-green)_ fill her eyes.

People speak, and she listens, and she understands.

There is a deep wrongness set into her bones, one that comes bearing glances over the shoulder and cold shadows in the night, one that touches her face with hands barely human and whispers you don’t belong here.

III.

She hears words like wands and Floo and owl, and the mobile above her bed of broomsticks and tiny people can’t just be moving from wind, but it’s not until someone calls her by her name that the pieces slot themself into place.

A family of redheads, a tilted house, _magic._

Harper screams, and the strings on the mobile snap as if cut by scissors.

IV.

Soft hands, warm hands, brush at her curls and wrap her in blankets. The woman (mother) sings to her in a voice as soft as the echo of hummingbird wings— _you are my bright, you are my river_ — and she wraps her tiny hand around a finger.

This is what Harper knows of love, in this new-old world: It keeps her safe. It makes her afraid.

_Who will protect them, if not me?_

(a cold brush of fingers— _you don’t belong here._ )

She remembers, she remembers. She was not Harper Weasley. She was not magic.

But she knows. She _remembers_ —

V.

Her brothers stand over her crib, and she blinks up at them. 

“This is your sister,” her mother says. “Her name is Harper. You must always protect her, understand?”

She stares, solemn, at Bill and Charlie, so young and already draped in red and gold.

_You won’t die. You won’t hurt. I swear it._

If a vow is made and no one hears it, did it happen at all?

( _Of course._ )

VI.

She crawls. She walks. The months fall by. Time is inconsequential, liquid. It slips through her fingertips and weaves tangles around her ankles.

Her mother’s belly swells. She presses an ear against it and closes her eyes and hears two heartbeats, beating in tandem, so close they may as well be one.

“These are your new brothers, Harp. You’ll be a good big sister, right?”

Harper looks up at her with wide eyes and nods. _Trust me, I will, I’ll protect them, they’ll never have to know the world without one another._

Fred and George Weasley are born on April 1st, 1978. It’s a Saturday, and it rains. Uncle Fabian and Uncle Gideon are watching her and Charlie and Bill while their parents are at the hospital, but when they come home the kitchen is alight with laughter and _love, love, love_.

The war has shadows here, and they are dark and bitter. She looks at her uncles and knows. She looks at Lily and James Potter when they visit and she knows. She looks at Peter Pettigrew, Albus Dumbledore, Alice and Frank Longbottom while they sit around the table in the Burrow, with her balanced on her father’s lap, and she knows.

She hates the word necessary. She hates it. But some things aren’t meant to be changed. History clings to some truths, and the end of the war is one of them.

And oh, she despises it.

But she looks at her brothers-- Bill, eight and pretending to be grown-up, and Charlie, wide-eyed and smiling, and Fred and George next to each other in the crib with tufts of red hair sticking every which way, and she knows it is _necessary_. For them.

Her family would survive. Her brothers would survive, and they would _live_.

(Or she’d die trying.)

VII.

It is 1980 and her parents are always up late, always whispering. Her mother watches the clock, now with a new hand labeled RON, near-obsessively when her father is at work. Harper sits in the garden and watches the gnomes run over the stone wall. She braids flowers into crowns and sits them on her baby brother’s head.

For now, she will be a child.

On long nights, cold nights, when she’s alone in her room listening to her heart beat solid in her chest, she makes lists and lists. _Diary-ring-locket-cup-diadem-snake-Harry. Fred-Tonks-Lupin-Sirius-Cedric-Lavender-Dumbledore-Colin-Snape._

The moon glows from outside her window, casting silver shadows over the wide floorboards, the slanted ceiling. She pulls the blanket up to her chin and shuts her eyes.

VIII.

It’s spring when the owl arrives.

Owls arriving isn't an unusual occurrence at the Burrow, and this one seems no different at first. It arrives after lunch, bedraggled from the rain that drips steady down the windowpanes and makes the ground swell. 

Harper is drawing little stars all over a piece of scrap parchment. Bill’s out chasing a snitch. Charlie’s poring over his magical creatures encyclopedia, Fred and George are stacking coloured blocks with pictures that shift and change, and Ron is upstairs sleeping.

Her mother opens the letter, and her face goes white.

Harper’s up and her arms are around her before she can get a word out. Charlie jumps up, too, and Fred knocks over the carefully stacked block tower and Molly cries and Harper tries not to think about her uncles spinning her around in the summer sunlight, smiles lighting up their faces.

 _Necessary_ , she tells herself, and buries her own tear-streaked face in her mother’s apron.

IX.

Ginevra Weasley is born in August. She’s a tiny thing, like all babies are, eyes still blue and practically blind.

Harper leans over the crib. She thinks of Ginny lying on the Chamber floor, all dark robes and red hair, and Tom Riddle standing translucent over her barely breathing body.

_It won’t happen to you. I won’t let it._

No matter what else, this role of big sister is a familiar one.

X.

The Dark Lord Voldemort is dead.

So are Lily and James Potter, but nobody is talking about that, at least not now. The shock of losing them will come later, will ache and bleed and scab over. 

The Dark Lord Voldemort is dead, and Harry Potter killed him.

She finds a garden rat behind the rosemary, missing a toe, and _oh_.

A cupboard under the stairs, an Azkaban cell. She picks up the rat with hands more gentle than Peter Pettigrew ever deserves and carries him inside.

 _Necessity_ , she thinks, _is the child of despair_.

XI.

When she sleeps she dreams cities. Packs of cooing blue pigeons. Food carts with banners and prices bright in the sun. Brick walls and stoplights, cars and planes and bright-white electric bulbs. Wide roads, bus schedules, rows of maple trees.

She wakes and paces her room. 

_My name is Harper Weasley_ , she tells herself, over and over. _I am five years old. I’m going to save my family._

XII.

She meets Hazel Saville purely by chance, while shopping for groceries with her mother in the village. The war has been over for eight months. Hazel’s mother is a witch, a fact made apparent by the wand casually tucked in a side pocket of her canvas shopping bag. Her and Molly arrange to have tea together while the girls play. 

They begin to meet every Friday at the Burrow. Mrs. Saville takes mint tea with honey and Molly has chamomile with ginger and milk and they talk about anything and everything while Harper and Hazel run off.

Here are the reasons Harper Weasley likes Hazel Saville.

Hazel has soft hands. They are always clean and her fingernails are pretty little ovals, all shiny and neat, but whenever they run off to the stream and get sand and soil on their skirts and fingers, she doesn’t mind.

Hazel is smart. She likes to talk about magic, about how there’s something wild in it, something more, and Harper will sit with her chin in her palms and soak it all in.

She likes Hazel because she doesn’t always say the right things, and it makes it better. Perfect people always have more to hide. 

Above all, she likes Hazel because they just _fit_. Harper and Hazel, Hazel and Harper, rarely one without the other, fire and earth. Hazel will scrape her knees and Harper’s magic will rise, unbidden, to heal them. Harper will lose a shoe in the river-mud and Hazel will retrace their steps, balancing on sticks and stones, to tug it back.

Harper-Hazel. Hazel-Harper. She wishes all their years could be spent like this, all wind-tossed and sun-dizzied.

XIII.

They walk Bill to the platform. She holds her father’s hand and stares and stares at the cherry red train, the hundred owls, the students and families. She clings to Bill, arms around his waist, not wanting to let go.

_(Be safe, be safe, be safe.)_

“Be safe,” she mumbles into his new robes, black and clean-pressed.

He ruffles her hair and she lets go, reluctant. “Course,” he says, and then it’s a kiss on the cheek and _bye-mum-bye-dad-bye-Charlie-Harper-Fred-George-Ron-Ginny_ and dragging his trunk onto the train and the doors shutting.

As it pulls away from the station, Harper breaks off from her tight-knit group and runs along the edge of the platform, waving to Bill as he hangs out a window, red hair aflame—

And he’s gone.

XIV.

Bill comes back from Hogwarts with a red and gold scarf and half-written Herbology assignments in the bottom of his trunk.

He lets Harper read his textbooks, his cramped handwriting in the margins. She spends hours sitting on her bed, sun drenching her room in yellows and pale golds, reading, learning. 

She doesn’t know what to do with Pettigrew. He sleeps in a drawer of her dresser she filled with soft gauze because Circe if he slept in her bed she might vomit. She wants Sirius to be free but there’s too much that could go wrong-- the resurrection, the Ministry battle, and so the rat sleeps on.

( _Even if she wants to strangle him, with or without a silver hand._ )

XIV.

Months pass. Bill leaves again. Fred and George are rapidly growing menaces, and Harper learns to lock her door so they can’t get in, for now.

She and Hazel learn to fly in the backyard, playing pick-up games with Charlie and Cedric Diggory. The snitch is tiny and shimmering and Charlie and Cedric race after it, but she only cares for chasing. Being a Seeker is such a lonely role, even if they do get the glory. She spins the red Quaffle in her hands and tosses it through the makeshift goal hoops.

Summers are a haze of sun-blistered shoulders and the smell of apple blossoms from the orchard. Charlie leaves for Hogwarts in the fall and comes back in summer to regale them with tales of moving staircases and secret passages and magic, magic.

Harper is eight years old and she has never not felt like the world is trying to drown her.

XV.

In July it thunderstorms, hard.

She steps out in the middle of it. Rain soaks her skin, and the sound of thunder and wind shakes her bones, but she doesn’t move until her mother drags her inside. 

Outside, branches of white light arc and twist. She presses her face to the cold glass and stares at the rain falling through that invisible barrier in the sky, wishing it solid so she could crawl out the window and walk straight across the sky to freedom.

XVI.

Her father brings home a blue Ford Anglia home and starts to tinker on it in the garage.

She sits next to him on long days, warm days, passing him the right wrench or watching him cut runes into the metal siding.

Her hair is always tied up in a mess of braids on her head, and her hands are always streaked with motor oil and scratched up with fine lines by the end of the day. Her mother tsks disapprovingly but she washes her hands with lemon soap and hot water and the skids of grease fade away into nothing.

Other days she’ll sit outside with her mother, doing embroidery and feeding the blackbirds handfuls of breadcrumbs, or she’ll brush Ginny’s hair while her mother pulls a batch of scones from the oven.

The world is bright, blazing, spinning past.


	2. ii.

XVII.

_Dear Miss Weasley,_

_We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list with all necessary books and equipment._

_Term begins on 1st September. We await your owl by no later than 31st of July._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Minerva McGonagall,_

_Deputy Headmistress._

XVIII.

In August 1987 she turns eleven and blows out the candles on her glazed lemon cake in a single breath.

Diagon Alley is sunny and _alive_ , vendors yelling and shop windows open, people of all sizes and shapes and colours running past. At Flourish & Blotts, while Bill buys his new textbooks and Charlie browses books on dragons, her parents let her pick out two new books. She finds one on duelling and one on runes. She gets new robes, too, since she’s a girl and her brothers’ hand-me-downs won’t fit her, no matter what trousers she wears at home.

And then it’s Ollivanders, and he stares at her for such a long moment she thinks _he knows he knows he knows_ until he moves and the tape measure flies into place and she breathes again.

Aspen and phoenix feather, 11 inches. Gold sparks, a rush of warmth, and that feeling of _right right right._

XIX.

_Oh,_ says the Sorting Hat as it settles onto her head. _You’re not who you’re supposed to be._

( _you don’t belong--_ )

_Wrong_ , she tells it. _I’m exactly who I’m meant to be._

It shows her yellow and black. _Loyalty_ , it says. It shows her blue and bronze, _Knowledge_ , and green and silver, _Power, power, you could be great, you know._

_But would I be happy?_ she asks.

Silence. And then--

The red and gold table erupts into cheers.

XX.

Harper has known a lot of love in this second life of hers, but none quite like the kind she feels for Hogwarts. She loves the downy four-poster bed with its heavy velvet curtains and she loves the warmth of the common room and she loves the Astronomy Tower at midnight with the stars a blanket above her and she loves the greenhouses, the banks of the lake, the ever-changing passages. The ceiling of the Great Hall, the way the stone walls melt into the sky and the wax pools at the base of the floating candles. She even loves Potions, the classroom dark and damp, neatly cutting lacewing flies and grinding snake fangs. Everything about Hogwarts is magic, magic, magic.

Hazel is in Ravenclaw, but they study together in the library, between tall towers of books and under layers of silencing charms. First years can’t play Quidditch, but they run together in the morning, sprinting over and around the pitch with dew and mist clinging to their skin, sun barely brushing the horizon.

XXI.

It’s not until near-January that Hazel corners her.

“You’re not telling me something,” she says. “Something important.”

Harper studies her for a long moment-- Hazel with her hands on hips, back as straight and solid as steel.

“Not here,” she says, and drags her to the seventh floor, to the tapestry of the dancing trolls.

They sit on the couches the Room provides, the setting a strange mix of the Ravenclaw and Gryffindor common rooms, red and eggshell blue, sun-tinted bronze.

“Hazel,” Harper says. “What do you know about reincarnation?”

XXII.

“The Dark Lord is alive,” Hazel says.

“Yes,” Harper says.

“You’re going to kill him,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She folds her hands on her lap, leans back. “Okay. I’m going to help. How can we start?”

XXIII.

They up their training routine, running in the mornings, studying in the afternoons, dueling in the Room of Requirement when they can. They study spells, runes. How to dismantle wards. How to break curses.

The Room gives them space to duel. A field one day, a forest the next, a wide open hotel lobby. They learn to use their surroundings-- Transfiguration is as useful in a duel as Charms.

“They can only be destroyed with basilisk venom and Fiendfyre,” Harper says when Hazel asks how they’ll destroy them. “And the Killing Curse for living ones.”

“Fiendfyre it is, then,” Hazel says, and twirls her wand in her fingers.

XXIV.

Weeks into May, she finds the diadem.

It whispers to her, and it sounds like everything from her old life-- _the rush of the sea, the industrial noise, her sister’s voice_ \-- until she sweeps it into the black pouch she summoned from one of the other tall stacks of junk and cinches it closed.

At night she thinks she can still hear it. She buries it under her robes and spare parchment, and dreams of an Albanian forest, the sky deep black and shivering.

XXV.

She missed the Burrow. Missed it like the roses miss the sun in winter, dead-petaled and frozen, missed it like a broken-winged bird misses the sky, like a deaf man misses music. When the train arrives at King’s Cross and she’s swept up in a series of farewells and promises to write letters ( _and oh, poor Errol_ ), and Bill takes her hand and Charlie helps her lift her trunk and she runs into her parents' arms. 

They take the car home, all of them squeezed in together, crowded despite the expansion charms: Molly and Arthur in the front, with Ginny between them, and Harper in between the twins, with Charlie on her left and Bill to her right and Ron practically sitting in her lap.

The car seems to run on their laughter alone. When they get to Ottery St. Catchpole, and drive up the familiar path that she hasn’t seen since Yule, she nearly cries at the sight of the crooked house, tilted against the blue of the sky. The chickens are wandering the yard and the laundry is hanging itself from the line and the air smells of home. 

Closing her eyes, she can almost believe she could lay down in the soft grass and sleep and let the world spin on without her. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

But then the door slams and Fred shouts and she drags her trunk up the stairs and leans out her window to watch the crows tumble through the sky and it feels like _home_.

XXVI.

She borrows Bill’s runes and curse-breaking books; wards the bottom drawer of her nightstand with a bloody fingertip and a pocket knife, pushing magic through her hands. She tucks the diadem away.

She is careful, ever so careful, to not speak a word about it in front of Pettigrew.

She helps her mother in the kitchen, her father in the shed. She lies in the apple orchard and stares up at the restless blue edges of the sky, branches cutting through her vision as cracks through a mirror, as wind on a sea. It smells of apple blossoms.


	3. iii.

iii.

XXVII.

The first time Harper attempts to cast Fiendfyre is a few weeks into the new school year.

They’re in the Room, as is typical, and her hands are shaking. She forces herself to take solid breaths. Fiendfyre feeds on emotion and relies on mental will to guide it, control it.

Loss of control is harmful at the best of times.

The first time Harper attempts to cast Fiendfyre, she burns her hands, singes her bangs, and shakes so badly for the days afterward that she can barely hold a quill.

XXVIII.

When the Grey Lady sees the _thing_ that calls itself a student, she freezes in the middle of the hallway, staring unblinkingly at the back of the thing’s head.

The Aberration wears a child’s skin like a cloak. It lives as though it isn’t Death walking, as though it _belongs_.

It has a name. It calls itself Harper.

The last time she felt fear this sharp, she was bleeding out in a forest in Albania. Nothing, nothing, not even the boy who kept the World Serpent sleeping under the school, felt this dark, as though it had crawled from the jaws of oblivion itself and not quite survived.

The Grey Lady does not go near it again.

XXIX.

Second year is a blur of studying and practicing and making plans upon plans, contingencies and safety nets. 

Bill graduates, Head Boy.

The slow heat of summer drags the days by lazily, like honey, sinking warm and rich into August. The water of the creek by the Burrow is cool and blue, and she spends days with her feet in the water and her head to the ground, listening to the heartbeat of the earth.

Her father tinkers with the car, intent on getting it off the ground. Her mother stitches protection charms into the lining of their worn cloaks. Her brothers soar through the sky. Ginny learns to fly.

In the later years these summers would have a rose-coloured cast to them, an edge of surrealism that would make her wonder if they had ever happened at all.

XXX.

Fred and George board the train with her and Charlie that autumn, and join them at the Gryffindor table.

Time has done nothing to mellow them out. They tug on her braids and make whispered deals with Peeves in between classes and spell the stairs to trick every third person to step on them. 

Harper sighs, tucks a stray curl behind an ear, and heads to Runes.

XXXI.

Yule at the Burrow is always solidly warm, knitted sweaters and hot chocolate and bonfires and laughter.

Harper’s thirteen years old, balancing on the cusp of childhood. Her head swims with plans, with wards, with curses Dark and Light.

She closes her eyes and lets her mother run her fingers through her hair. _This is good_ , she thinks. 

_But it could be broken. Unless I fix it._


	4. iv.

XXXII.

The summer nights are never quite kissed by darkness as she rests her elbows on the window frame and leans half out. She can smell the lilac twining up this side of the house, and the lemon balm that grows in abundance down the path. The midnight sun falls through her skin and settles deep inside the hollows of her bones.

She thinks there’s a storm on its way.

In the life before this, she’d always had the unearthly ability to know when to scramble home, getting there moments before a storm hit.

But now, all she knows is the cool touch of a breeze, the soft breath of a flower opening under the moonlight, the prickle between her shoulders that could be from fear or from an intruding storm or some hastily veiled mix of both.

XXXIII.

She gets a job for the summer at a coffee shop in the village, all brick walls and plants and mismatched chairs. She’s regulated to washing dishes in the back and wiping down tables, but something in the mundane work, in the repetition, is soothing.

She changes the pounds into Galleons at Gringotts that August while the rest of the family is shopping for supplies. Puts them in a new account under her name only.

She pauses on the steps of the bank. Watches the people walk, run by.

Behind her lies a warning.

( _Enter, stranger, but take heed--_ )

She steps away, and on.

XXXIV.

There is something in the way Luna Lovegood looks at her, that makes her heart speed up and her breath catch, that same eerie, terrible sense she had when Ollivander studied her four years ago.

She is wraith-like, this Luna: hair a pale halo of curls around her face, eyes like clouds.

She reaches out to touch Harper’s hand while Ginny is turned away and she _knows_ \--

XXXV.

They ride hippogriffs in Care of Magical Creatures.

Steeltail is the name of the one Harper sits astride, and they soar and they soar and they soar.

She feels weightless, endless. She reaches out her arms and stretches them and it seems to her that the very boundaries between her and the sky are melting away, fading to a bad dream, a vacant memory.

_(She is on top of the world._

_She never wants to let go of this breathless, tumbling euphoria.)_

XXXVI.

“Imperio,” says Hazel.

_(and she’s floating, she’s floating, this is right, this is right. everything is right, is it not? it is. it is._

_jump._

_yes, yes I should jump, because everything is good and if I jump it will be good--)_

She jumps. Hazel breaks it off.

“Again,” Harper says, and braces herself.

XXXVII.

Sometimes, Harper will stand brooding under the steam of the dorm showers, water running down her hair and back, all the edges of the world blurred.

She’ll imagine that in some other universe, some other life, the other version of herself is doing the same.

It makes her feel less alone.

She turns the tap off, summons a towel, dries her hair with a charm from one of her roommate’s copy of _Witch Weekly_. Small moments of tenderness are better than none.

XXXVIII.

“So,” Hazel says. “The cup is in Gringotts.”

Harper hums.

“Plan?” Hazel asks.

“Polyjuice, Imperio, more Polyjuice after Thief’s Downfall, get in, get the cup, Imperio my way out,” she says promptly. “Obliviate.”

“And if something goes wrong?” Hazel says.

Harper blinks. “Of course something will go wrong. That’s why I’ve made no plans for it.” She lays back against the soft blue couch. “Improvisation!”

“Somehow I don’t think improvising will help you rob Gringotts,” says Hazel with a sigh, but they move on.

XXXIV.

Harper’s second time attempting to cast Fiendfyre goes like this:

Sparks, a rush of energy to her fingertips, _toomuchtoomuchtoomuch_ , and panic panic panic.

The third time follows immediately after, and a panther of gold fire bursts from her wand.

It takes all her energy. It gorges on indecision, and she pushes everything that is not a willingness for it to succeed away. Hazel’s presence is grounding, all earth and cool stone.

When it is over, dissipated to nothing, she collapses on the floor and tries to ignore how her fingers shake.

_You wanted this. You wanted this. You wanted this. You wanted this._

_For them, I will._

XXXV.

Charlie graduates.

In the in-between, after school is let out but before he leaves for Romania, she takes long walks with him around the Burrow. Through the orchard, over the creek, across the fields. They talk about flight-- her father’s car, Charlie’s dragons.

When he stands with her in the field, face tilted towards the sun, she can see her father in her brother. They are both so in love with these dangerous things that could fly.

 _And me?_ Harper thinks, and she wonders. 

( _Fire will soar forever if you dream hard enough, won’t it?_ )


	5. v.

XXXVI. 

A scrawny kid with scuffed-up shoes and a blackberry tangle of curls, holding a snowy owl and a trunk, glancing desperately around.

“Firstie, right? You’ve gotta run through,” she says, stepping up to him, smiling at the bewildered look on his face. “Come on. Bye, Mum!”

She steers the trolley into the wall and emerges back into the familiar world of red metal and black smoke and tearful goodbyes.

XXXVII.

It begins on Samhain.

The veil between worlds is at its thinnest, and Harper feels as though she is suffocating. Autumn has always ached more than any other season.

Hermione Granger is crying in the girls bathroom. 

Ron comes to Harper, Harry trailing behind, to tell her. She has half a mind to tell them to stay behind while she goes, but they are nothing if not stubborn so she holds her tongue and her wand and leads the way down into the lower levels of the castle.

The troll is a mountain in its own right, and it smashes sinks with reckless abandon. Hermione huddles in the corner, ankle-deep in water, leg stuck through with bits of ceramic, bleeding. Ron and Harry run to her, and Harper casts a stinging hex at the troll.

It turns to her.

White fire pours from her wand-- not Fiendfyre, no, but the iridescent flames she and Hazel had found last year in some text so ancient it nearly crumbled in their hands. The troll screams. It screams and its a horrible noise, bone-rattling and tooth-shaking, and then it falls to the floor.

A noise from the doorway makes her turn. The professors are there, and Harry and Ron helping Hermione stand, all wide-eyed.

But Quirrell is staring at her with something else, his brown eyes glinting red in the lanternlight.

XXXVIII.

He watches her with the kind of edge that a predator looks at another predator with. Evaluating. Calculative.

Her hands tremble and they do not stop.

 _Come on,_ she wants to say. _Take the plunge. Water’s right there. I can see you aching from all the way across the room._

XXXIX.

It is her OWLs year. It doesn’t mean much to her, considering the very high likelihood that she’ll die before she can properly graduate, but Hazel coerces her into studying. Between the acres of homework the professors are assigning and trying to finalize her plans for next year, it's all she can do not to fall asleep on her feet.

They are fifteen years old and planning the murder of a Dark Lord the rest of the world thinks long-buried.

In loose moments, spare moments, when the world seems to halt just long enough for them to catch their breath, they sit by the banks of the lake.

Harper digs her heels into the grass, and yes, it feels like lifetimes of sorrow weighing heavy on her heart, but it also feels like birdsong, honeysuckle, laughter, _healing._

XL.

“Harp,” Ron says. She’s curled in a chair in the common room, trying to pick apart a new runic array Hazel designed. “Do you know who Nicholas Flamel is?”

She looks up. He and Harry and Hermione are standing there, fidgeting. She sets down her wand.

“Nicholas Flamel is a world-renowned alchemist and the only known maker of the Philosopher’s Stone,” she says, and turns her head back to the array.

XLI.

She sits beside her brother’s bed, in the Hospital wing, his head bandaged.

“The Stone,” he manages when he wakes up, and she shushes him.

“Safe,” she says. “Circe, Ron, why would you run off like that, do you have any idea--” _how scared I was, how terrified I was, and maybe this was meant to happen but I was still afraid--_

His hand finds hers. They’re small again, five and ten, curled under her blankets during a thunderstorm.

She closes her eyes and the white queen stands over him, crumpled on the cold chessboard, eleven years old. 

If her grip tightens on his hand, he does not say a word.

XLII.

Gryffindor wins the House Cup.

XLIII.

She leaves work early on the seventh of July and takes the Knight Bus to Little Hangleton.

Even without knowing what she knows, there is _something_ eerie about this town. Something that calls to her and terrifies her in equal measure. All the buildings look like they want to swallow her whole.

The Gaunt shack, with a dead snake nailed to the door, is no different.

She feels the Horcrux before she sees it. A deep, roiling sense of dread, of _wrong_ , before a wash of soft light not unlike the Imperius telling her to _come closer, pick it up, come closer._

The compulsion charm is strong, make no mistake, and the flesh-eating curse even stronger. But Harper Weasley is not Albus Dumbledore; she has no dead sister to seek forgiveness from, and she can shake Hazel’s strongest Imperio, and she unravels the curse and levitates the ring into a bag.

She takes the Knight Bus home to Ottery St. Catchpole, and walks the rest of the way. Tipping her head back, the air smells like rain. The sky seems to press its fingertips to her closed eyelids, and she smiles.

XLIV.

_Ordinary Wizarding Level Results_

_Pass Grades:_

_Outstanding (O)  
Exceeds Expectations (E)  
Acceptable (A)_

_Fail Grades:_

_Poor (P)  
Dreadful (D)  
Troll (T)_

_Harper Cedrella Weasley has achieved:_

_Ancient Runes O  
Arithmancy O  
Astronomy O  
Care of Magical Creatures E  
Charms O  
Defense Against the Dark Arts O  
Herbology E  
History of Magic A  
Potions E  
Transfiguration O_

XLV. 

“Hey, Harry,” Harper says, hands loose on the steering wheel, face lit by the dashboard and the tangerine-halo of the streetlight. “Heard you needed a lift.”

Fred and George pick the locks on his door, load the trunk in the back, and they’re all laughing as they pull away into the sky, Vernon Dursley hanging out the second-story window.

XLVI.

“Here, girl - take your book - it's the best your father can give you,” Lucius Malfoy sneers, and tosses two books back into Ginny’s cauldron. One spine-cracked and well-worn, the other small and black and embossed with shining letters on the back: T. M. RIDDLE.

Harper slips it into her own pocket.

XLVII.

In the bottom drawer of her nightstand sits a lost-and-found crown of blue and silver, a ring of black and gold, and a diary so slim it could dissolve into shadows.

XLVIII.

“How inconvenient,” she says to the solid barrier, and leads Harry and Ron to a bench where they wait for her parents.

XLIX.

There is no monster haunting the halls this year; no voices in the walls, no one frozen in the hospital wing. The basilisk sleeps soundly under the school full of children, untouched.

She and Hazel spend long days out on the banks of the Black Lake, in snow and rain and sun. Hazel’s face is framed in delight, and Harper commits every inch of this moment to memory. The stripe of sunlight across Hazel’s face, and the waves on the lake, and her smile blazing like an ever-tumbling waterfall.

 _By this time next year,_ she thinks. _I will be gone from this place. Chasing shadows and demons._

It’s more sobering than she wants it to be.


	6. vi.

L.

_Dear Mum and Dad,_

_I’m leaving. There’s something important I have to do, need to do, and I need to do it now. If there was another way, I’d take it, but there’s not. I’m sorry. I understand if you hate me, I do, but please know I’m doing this for you, for all of you. I’ll write when I can. Don’t worry, I’m going to be safe. Don’t look for me. I don’t want you getting hurt._

_Love,  
Harper._

LI.

She goes to France.

Muggle transportation is easy enough-- no matter how long she lives in this body, she knows it well. Her wand is tucked into a holster on her wrist, the Trace gone with her birthday, and a shrunken down trunk is stowed safely in her pocket, full of clothes and books and the entirety of her Gringotts vault. 

The air feels as heavy as unspilled rain. She lies back on the bed of her rented room and shuts her eyes. 

LII.

Sirius Black escapes Azkaban. It’s in the back of _Le Quotidien_ , in the international section while she browses it over coffee. 

Time draws its noose around her.

She studies with a burning fervor. Fire magic still comes easiest to her: all-consuming, bright. Every touch of wind feels like gun smoke. Polyjuice bubbles over a low cauldron, hastily set up in the corner of the bathroom.

At night she dreams of home: of the Burrow with open skies and green fens and fields, flowers crawling from the windows, sun setting the horizon aflame. The world fits in the center of this rosebud, as tender and delicate as spun sugar.

LIII.

She is as Atlas was, the world balanced between her shoulder blades. 

Witches are meant to float, but sometimes, when she stands in the sand, the dark Atlantic pulling at her feet, she wants to walk along the bottom of the ocean. She’d let the water fill up her lungs and turn her a new shade of blue, the faintest brush of light reaching down, down, down through the deep.

Even the brightest of wildfires can be doused by the sea. Icarus learned that lesson well enough.

LIV.

She steps foot in Britain for the first time in eleven months in July 1994.

The Polyjuice is a pale green, like an unfurling fern, and her heart trembles in her throat.

The door to the Lestrange vault melts away under the glaze-eyed goblin’s touch, the golden cup perched atop a veritable mountain of silver.

She reaches for it.

LV.

Four Horcruxes, and three left. She reads about the Quidditch World Cup, the Dark Mark illuminating the shadow-dusted sky, about the two Hogwarts champions. In the photograph, Harry looks every bit his age, small and uncertain, and she bites down on the word _necessary_ with a cold hatred for what is to come.

LVI.

Cedric Diggory dies, and she cries for three days straight, thinking of a boy who chased her across sunlit fields, balanced on their old brooms, feather-hearted, grey eyes shining.

Lord Voldemort returns, and even as the Prophet shouts accusations and hurls bitter words at the boy who watched it happen, Harper curls her hands into fists, fingernails cutting her palms. The Horcruxes hum from their place in her trunk.

Anger, at least, she knows.

And it _burns._

LVII.

_Dear Fred and George,_

_It’s me, your sister. You know, the one who does the best disappearing act and all that. I need your help, and I need you not to tell anyone you got this letter, understand? You’re at Grimmauld Place (and don’t ask how I know that) and there should be a house elf named Kreacher. Ask him for Regulus’s locket. Tell him you can destroy it, and he should give it to you. Do not put it on. Send it to me when you have it. All I can tell you is that I’m working to destroy Voldemort, and this is a part of that. I’m sorry for leaving, and I’m sorry I can’t tell you more._

_Love,  
Harper._

LVIII.

Little Hangleton is as sinister as she remembers it. More so, even, with the foreboding presence of Riddle Manor atop the hill, stirring with magical life.

The wards around it are delicately-strung, near invisible, but hastily arranged. She picks them apart beside the graveyard, dodging the arrays for alarms and defenses. When she’s done, she’s keyed herself in, her magical signature woven along the ward lines as if it had always been there.

She can’t kill the snake yet. It’s too early, and he’d know something was wrong, but her hand twitches on her wand all the same. She thinks of her father, laid out bleeding on the Ministry floor, and her knuckles go white.

LIX.

Harper stands alone in an abandoned parking lot out east from Paris. It’s four in the morning and February. On the cold asphalt in front of her are five soul fragments of the monster that named itself Voldemort.

Diary, ring, locket, cup, diadem. They glitter under the starlight, a magpie’s best findings, most treasured possessions. They call to her, whisper, and she tells herself even lions can be wary of slithering things, crawling through the dark.

Fiendfyre trails from the tip of her wand, glistering, polished. 

His soul screams as it burns, and her hands barely shake.

LX.

The morning of Harry Potter’s final OWL examinations, she returns to Little Hangleton, slipping through the wards as easily as a ghost through water.

The house is empty but for Nagini sleeping on the floor of the study. Harper raises her wand and levels it. 

Two words, a flare of green.

( _And then there was one._ )


	7. vii.

LXI.

The Ministry is the same as she remembers from the day her father brought her to work. He had shown her his office, full of Muggle artifacts and paper airplanes spinning past her head, and she had smiled listening to him wonder what rubber ducks were for.

She waits by the phone booth, disillusioned.

They arrive on thestrals, and she wants to cry seeing Ron and Ginny. Her little siblings, so fierce in this moment, so brave, and Neville clutching his father’s wand, Hermione with a thunderstorm in her eyes, Luna with that waif-like presence solidified into an unbound wildness, Harry with terror-soaked bones and impossible determination.

She trails after them, her invisible visitor badge reading _Harper Weasley, Dark Lord vanquisher._

LXII.

The Veil wants to eat her alive. It’s a tugging in her bones, in her soul, the boundary of her heartbeat melting into the sound of the voices stirring through the archway. It hurts like Samhain has always hurt her, her body resting between two worlds, pulled taught, her very blood crying out for salvation, for silence.

Bellatrix Lestrange hurls the killing curse at her cousin, eyes wild, and Harper reaches out with a rope of tangled air and pulls him aside.

LXIII.

The Dark Lord Voldemort stands at the other end of the Ministry atrium, draped in trailing shadows and halos of light from the sconces along the wall. He appears as a wraith caught, balancing, on the edge of two worlds: heaven and earth, light and shadow.

The green light of the killing curse strikes Harry Potter down a half-second before Dumbledore tries to pull him away, and the scream his friends let out is a sound that shudders through her body like a many-winged bird preparing for flight.

She slips from her shadow of disillusionment and steps out.

LXIV.

“Harper Weasley,” he says, eyes as terrible as when Quirrel watched her kill that troll with glowing flames. “You ran away.”

Behind the fountain, Harry Potter stirs.

“I’m going to kill you now,” she says simply.

He laughs at her, at the picture she makes: this tall, flame-haired girl, all elbows and sharp edges, bright-eyed, wand held with practiced ease. “You cannot kill me,” he says. “I, Lord Voldemort, who have gone further down the path of immortality than any other before me.”

“The diary,” she says, and he freezes. In the corner of her vision she sees Dumbledore, crouched over Harry, and Ron and Ginny staring at her with eyes all hurt-fear-relief, and the Minister in his lime-green bowler just out of the Floo, Bones and Scrimgeour and the Aurors not far behind. But she and the monster that was once Tom Riddle are in their own world now. “Ring. Locket, cup, diadem. Snake. And Harry Potter, though you just destroyed that yourself.”

“Lies,” he hisses, but he’s panicked. It’s in the tension in his shoulders, the eerie brightness of his red eyes, fixed solely on her.

She holds her ground.

“I don’t lie. No one is meant to live forever.” A head tilt, an adjustment to her stance. “Not even you.”

He moves.

He’s fast, _Circe_ , he’s fast, but she’s fast too, and the prophecy is lying in bits of splintered glass around Neville’s feet, and _crucio-bombarda-reducto-sectumsempra_. The ground rises, the ground falls, and the statues in the fountain come to life, running at her. She conjures her Fiendfyre panther, and somebody screams ( _it sounds like Ginny_ ) but she knows this spell as well as she knows herself. There is no indecision in her heart, no shaking in her hands, and it charges the Dark Lord. He dissolves it with a complicated motion and _aguamenti-glacius-avada-kedavra-everte-statum-levicorpus_. She dances, she ducks, she slips. Something slashes her left forearm open, and she can see the white of her bone, and she _laughs_ \--

(It was always going to end like this, her and him. She knew it from the moment she opened her eyes and saw that this wasn’t the world she left behind.)

 _And he knows it now_ , she thinks, almost gleefully as her conjured lightning twists around him. He banishes it and he’s furious, furious, _you think you can win against me, little girl?_

“Yes,” she says honestly, and the ground turns to magma under his feet, and he screams.

A flick of her wand turns it back to stone and he’s sunk into his knees, snarling still, and his wand flies to her hand. This wand that has killed hundreds, tortured more, bone-white in the Atrium glow, thrumming in her hand. Her arm is soaked in blood and her head feels light, spinning. 

“The thing about Unforgivables,” she says, “is you have to _mean_ them.” She points her wand at his chest. “For my family,” she says. “For everyone else’s who you ripped apart.” 

(Her hand does not tremble.)

Life is made of circles, of cycles. An ouroboros endlessly chasing itself. It began with this same curse, nearly fifteen years ago, and it will end with it now.

_Avada Kedavra._

LXV.

The first time Harry Potter saw Harper Weasley was on the mundane side of King’s Cross in 1991. He was struck by how _bright_ she was-- near incandescent. When the Sorting Hat said _and Slytherin would help you on the way to greatness_ he thought not of how pompous Draco Malfoy was, but how bright Harper was, how kind. How _good_. 

He wanted to be good, too.

Looking at her now, freckles painted across her skin, standing over the half-sunken body of Voldemort in the Ministry Atrium, hair a banner of fire, arm drenched in blood, he understands. 

Harper is not _good_. She is not anyone’s absolution. Harper is something burning, something blazing. Something bright.

 _Not what is easy, but what is right_ , Dumbledore had said, and oh, Harry sees.

He sees Ron flinching when they pass her empty room, the mumble that _Harper ran away_ , the longing in Ginny’s eyes. The deep, churning, wrongness that heralded her empty place at the Burrow’s table. He had only known her for two years, but he’d seen her face down mountain trolls and school teachers alike. He sees her finding what keeps Voldemort tethered to life, to leave everything behind to chase it. To face death in the hope that the world would know some fragile semblance of peace.

He sees the train station, empty and white, and the twisted piece of Voldemort under the bench. His mother and father, as they had looked in the Mirror of Erised all those years ago, telling him he could go back, or he could go on.

Not what is easy. What is _right._

His heart is weightless; he has never felt this light. Harper is standing in her own blood and he can still see the lightning she conjured, the fire straight from the depths of hell. The buzz of noise has reached a crescendo, the Aurors rushing around. Lucius Malfoy on the ground with a split lip, and Bellatrix Lestrange writhing, ropes tightening around her body, and Fudge standing shocked in the center of it all.

No.

Harper is the center of it all. Even as a healer comes and mutters a spell and the blood vanishes from the floor. Even as she sways on her feet, the white of the bone in her arm glittering, exposed. Even as they take her away, to St. Mungo’s or elsewhere.

He thinks he can still see a stain on the floor where her blood was. Her arm ripped open, and her biting down in order to whisper that final spell, that solid green light, in the hope that it would give her some damp sunlit patch of silence. Destroying. Burning.

No, Harper Weasley is not good. 

She is something _more_.

LXVI.

The aftermath is a white bed in a private room at St. Mungo’s and an aching silence in her soul.

It’s over. It’s done.

She could cry with the relief of it.

A long scar runs up her left arm, over the place where a Dark Mark would lay, puckered and twisted. She drags her fingertips over it, a physical reminder of today, of these past years.

There’s a commotion at the door, and a crowd with red hair bursts in and a sob catches in her throat and there are arms around her, and _love_ , and it feels like she has never left.

The Prophet on her side table, a photograph of her standing blood-drenched over the corpse of the Dark Lord, goes unread.

LXVII.

“Mum,” she says. “I’m tired.”

“Of course, sweetheart, of course-- what can I do?”

“I want to go home,” she says. “Please. Take me home.”

Her mother's eyes fill with tears.

LXVIII.

“What will you do now?” Hazel asks.

They’re sitting by the creek. The sky is wide and blue and unassuming, the sun a sack of cornmeal. Billowing gold-lined clouds float languid above them. White strawberries grow along the banks, no bigger than a fingernail.

Harper tilts her head back, and the sun’s rays are like music on her skin. It is a paradise here, wonderful and gentle.

“Live,” she says, and the word tastes like sugar on her tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know its short but the plot sorta jumped into my head and wouldn't leave so,, here we are! thank you so so so very much for reading!! <33


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